Dr. Merrill Matthews

Merrill Matthews, Ph.D., is a resident scholar with the Institute for Policy Innovation. He is a public policy analyst specializing in health care issues and is the author of numerous studies in health policy and other public policy issues. He is past president of the Health Economics Roundtable for the National Association for Business Economics, the largest trade association of business economists.

For nine years Dr. Matthews was executive director of the Washington, DC-based Council for Affordable Health Insurance, a trade association of health insurers. Dr. Matthews served for 10 years as the medical ethicist for the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center’s Institutional Review Board for Human Experimentation, and has contributed chapters to several books, including Physician Assisted Suicide: Expanding the Debate, The 21st Century Health Care Leader and, in 2009, Stop Paying the Crooks (on Medicare fraud). He also serves as chairman of the Texas Advisory Committee of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

He is a weekly columnist for Forbes.com and has been published in numerous journals and newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Investor’s Business Daily, Barron’s, USA Today and the Washington Times. He was an award-winning political analyst for the USA Radio Network, and for several years had a daily one-minute commentary on Sirius-XM Radio. In 2008 the BBC invited him to star in a program on welfare reform in Great Britain, and specifically Wales.

Dr. Matthews received his Ph.D. in Humanities from the University of Texas at Dallas. His bachelor’s is in economics from the University of Texas at Arlington, and he has a master’s in divinity from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.